Antonín Procházka

* 1929

  • "Anyway, I didn't find out until later. The two [colleagues] were stealing or not stealing, they were getting money through the shops. Well, they arrested them and I was an accountant there. And on the fourth of June, I went to work normally. And the cops came, picked me up, saying they needed to explain something. So they took me to Liberec and it took me five and a half years to explain it. I got ten years [in prison]. Everybody had said I was coming home. Even the cops. When the trial was over, my parents came from Moravia expecting I'd be home. They came and looked for me and my wife told them: He had got ten years. I don't know, they just needed to blame me, because my father had retired without getting a pension. So they simply gave me ten years and that was it. And when I appealed, it still didn't help."

  • "But Mr. Rolný still worked. When we needed something, we'd go to him and he'd give us money for a party or something. He was a commercial councillor, he owned Grandhotel in Prostějov and he rode a bike. And we had uniforms and we always had to greet him. Hi guys, he used to shout. He was great. And his son was supposed to take over [the business], but he run off to Switzerland. And then when things turned around, he came back, he was going to restart the Rolný company, and one of his colleagues betrayed him, and it went bankrupt, and it was the end of Rolný again."

  • "There was a police station and we lived on the first floor. And where we slept, we left the blinds up, and where we didn't sleep, we drew the blinds down. In case they were throwing bricks, to be thrown where they thought we were sleeping. But the Germans guarded the police station with rifles, so nothing could actually happen to us. Only the Czechs who were around were suffering."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Hrádek nad Nisou, 04.04.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:57:38
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

They imprisoned him for ten years. My uncle feared the same fate and preferred to slash his wrists

Doing his military service II, 1951-1953
Doing his military service II, 1951-1953
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Antonín Procházka was born on 20 April 1929 in Kroužek, a part of the village of Rousínov in the Vyškov region. His father, born in 1895, trained in Vienna as a shop assistant. During the World War I he ended up in Russian captivity on the Eastern Front. The witness grew up with his brother and parents in the village of Hlubočany, where his father was sent to serve as a policeman. The village was part of the so-called Vyškov language island, which was the smallest German-speaking enclave in former Czechoslovakia. After the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, he and his parents moved to Nížkovice, where he experienced the liberation by the Soviet army in April 1945. He had already been training as a tailor at the school founded by Arnošt Rolný in Prostějov. He started working at OP (clothing company) Prostějov and in 1948 the company sent him to Varnsdorf in northern Bohemia to set up warehouses. Subsequently, he continued to do so in Liberec. In 1954 he got married. He worked as an accountant in the company. In 1957 he was arrested and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment for alleged fraud, and ordered to pay compensation. He spent five and a half years in prison in the Vojna labour camp near Příbram and in Pankrác prison. He first saw his son Jaroslav Procházka when he was three years old. The son later became a record holder in lifting beer barrels. The witness lived through the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968 in Liberec. In 2022, he was living in a senior home in Hrádek nad Nisou.